In the course of my work on the canal overhaul, I am looking at increasing the number of aqueducts. However, I cannot find the .blend files for the existing aqueducts, nor, indeed, the .blend files for many of the recent bridges added by The Hood in the early part of this year. Might I request that these be uploaded so that I can do some work on aqueducts? Similarly with narrow gauge bridges.

I also notice that the colour of the water in the aqueducts is slightly different (higher saturation, darker) than in the rest of the canals, and that the work on increasing the number of bridges in Standard did not seem to extend to aqueducts. We should probably at least have different brick/stone types, I think, and possibly stone/brick beam bridges?

For the purposes of the overhaul, does anyone have any ideas as to whether ship canals in the UK ever had aqueducts, or was it just the barge and narrow boat canals?

There are no blends for the aqueduct - I took the road bridge images and superimposed canal images in GIMP. I suspect the difference in shading is due to kierongreen's redo of the way images for half heights (bridges weren't done I don't think?).

The narrow gauge bridge I don't think has a blend either - I think that was wlindley in GIMP from the standard gauge equivalent.

Many of the standard gauge bridges don't have blends for the complete section - they were done (with more care than the aqueduct!) in GIMP. I do have the GIMP xcf file and blends for some of the parts. I should upload those to the blend repository soon.

For your final question I don't know of any ship canal aqueducts - I'd imagine they are too large for that?

Yes, I wondered whether ship canals might be too large for aqueducts - meaning that we need only broad, narrow and tub-boat canal aqueducts.

I should be most grateful if you could let me know when you have uploaded the xcf and .blend files for the relevant bridges so that I can look into this (and possibly fix the existing images whilst I am about it).

Can you give a brief outline of the procedure by which you modify bridges in the Gimp?

OK I'm just uploading these now. As you can see from some of the xcf files, it's a case of rendering the sides/backs of the bridge structure and then creating that as a layer and aligning it manually in GIMP. Then, it's simply merging the xcf into a png.